CHUCK, your fine article points out serious common sense security issues that need to be addressed and resolved before the USDOT mandates EDR technology. If they continue to duck these issues consumers will be test dummies and may react with a backlash to this life saving technology. Seems to me like the IEEE did the heavy lifting up to this point. Kudos to them. What few people know is that NHTSA had been asked to act a few times already but they lack the congressional mandate to deal with privacy and consumer protection issues. Instead they express crocodile tears and pass the issue on to the states.

Chuck, having some way to detect tampering would be a good first step. This is difficult, though. The first time that this data was used in a legal proceeding, if there were not more safeguards, it would be challenged as not being secure. Another big concern is the one you point out in the article. If the data were tampered with on a large scale, it would be scientifically useless. One would have to develop a tampering model to estimate the effect. Safeguards would be a much better solution.

Industrial workplaces are governed by OSHA rules, but this isn’t to say that rules are always followed. While injuries happen on production floors for a variety of reasons, of the top 10 OSHA rules that are most often ignored in industrial settings, two directly involve machine design: lockout/tagout procedures (LO/TO) and machine guarding.

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